Why Two Businesses Hiring the Same Role Can End Up With Completely Different Candidate Pools

Two businesses in the same city post almost identical job ads for a Finance Manager.

Same salary, same experience level, same core responsibilities. Six weeks later, one has three strong offers out. The other has two candidates on the shortlist, neither quite right, and a growing feeling that the market's just tough for this role right now.

Usually, that's not what's actually happening. What's happening is they're looking at two different candidate pools of people.

"The market" isn't one thing

Talk to most founders about hiring difficulty and you'll hear "the market" described like it's one fixed thing, either short of candidates or not. In practice, two businesses hiring the exact same title are rarely looking at the same set of people at all.

A few things decide who's actually in that candidate pool, and none of them show up on the job spec.

Where the role sits, precisely. Not the city, but which side of it, and what that does to commute times for the people who'd actually apply.

Where the salary lands against the two or three employers a candidate is realistically comparing you to. Not the national average for the job title.

How well known the business is to people already working in that role. A recognised employer pulls candidates from further away. An unfamiliar one is competing purely on the offer.

What stage the business is at. Some people want the pace of somewhere small and early. Others are actively avoiding it. Same job spec, opposite reaction.

How the role is set up to work. Hybrid, remote, fixed office. This one change alone can shrink or double the realistic pool, depending on the role.

Get all five roughly similar, and two businesses might genuinely be drawing from close to the same pool. Change even one or two, and they're not competing for the same people at all, even with an identical job ad.

Where the wrong conclusion gets drawn

A business struggling to fill a role tends to assume the salary's too low, or the role itself is a hard sell. Sometimes that's right. Just as often, the job ad, the process, or how visible the business is to that specific audience is quietly filtering out people who'd have been genuinely interested, and the business never finds out, because those people never applied in the first place.

Meanwhile a business three streets away, hiring the identical title, might be pulling from a pool twice the size, for reasons that have nothing to do with the role at all.

Start with the Candidate Pool

Before deciding a role is hard to fill, it's worth working out what candidate pool you're actually fishing in. Not the theoretical market for that job title. The specific set of people who'd realistically consider this role, at this business, under these conditions, right now.

That's a different question to "is the job ad good enough." It means understanding who's actually out there, where they currently sit, what they're weighing you up against, and what would need to change for them to move. Get that picture first, and the job ad, the process and the offer all have something real to aim at.

Skip it, and you can write the best job ad in the world and still be aiming at a pool that was never going to answer.